Meredith gave us a heads-up
>I haven't seen it yet but Jessica Yates reports that the current Private
>Eye (a so-called humourous if not scurrilous
>magazine in the UK) has a DWJ reference on the Literary Review page
Oh, definitely funny in parts (and *not* like the Curate's Egg in that respect).
Satire lurking hoof in mouth under every bush, and all power to them say I.
I'd missed this, but a swift sortie downstairs reveals that yes, indeed,
DWJ gets a mention in the first column on page 24 of issue number 1192 of
31st August - 13th September 2007 /Private Eye/. The subject is a review
of Marie Phillips' /Gods Behaving Badly/, and the mention draws attention
to the debt Phillips appears to owe to Neil Gaiman's 2002 book /American
Gods/ (among several others!). It then says
But Gaiman himself isn't entirely in the clear: he had to
change his book to avoid too obvious a comparison with an
earlier treatment of the same premise in /Eight Days of
Luke/ by Diana Wynne Jones (1975).
Interesting to me because I know that DWJ did read an early draft of
/American Gods/ and demand changes in it, which Neil duly made, but as far
as I know the changes she asked for had nothing to do with /Eight Days of
Luke/. Has he subsequently claimed differently? Or has she? At the time
plagiarism didn't seem to be an issue, let's say: the matter was factual
rather than literary, as I understood it.
Minnow